The Cocktail Mix for Leadership Failure
Think back to a situation where you may have lived through a similar situation. You are leading your team successfully — meaning you are meeting and exceeding the sales and marketing expectations and your team seems to be happy. The last team climate check came very positive, with some of the best scores in your assigned geographical area. For reasons that you failed to understand, your boss decides to bring in a new person, an outsider who does not even speak the language of the customers, and move all geographical functions under this new person. How does this affect you? You are now reporting to a different individual that you are not familiar with, all regional GMs got demoted basically, and the only answer that you receive from your boss is that “he is getting ready to transition to a different role” — in other words, this new person will be taking over his position in the near future.
Have you ever encountered a similar situation in your job? If so, how did that make you feel? How did your team feel about the changes? What effect did those changes have on the overall team? Could you label those emotions and how those affected your and your team’s productivity?
First of all, notice than we usually run into those types of situations, we do not ask the person involved to describe the fact-based action plan that he or she will now be implementing. We usually ask them about their feelings and emotions. I am going to tell you how I felt. I felt p — — off. I was mad and I made sure that my team knew my feelings. I may have even talked to some of my closest customers about this impostor that was taking over our division. I may have mentioned it during dinner at home. I may have mentioned it to my friends and family.
It also did not help that during the first departmental meeting, the new comer told us that things were going to change. Something about a burning platform metaphor that explained why we needed to change. Never mind that the results were good and that we were meeting all the sales goals… “we need to be ready for the changes coming”… how would he even know about any changes coming since the only times that he ever stepped foot in our region was with a piña colada in his hand and sitting by the beach? I was fuming and so was my team.
In retrospect, I have to confess that he was partially right and that most of the changes that he asked us to implement made us a better sales and marketing unit. But his approach resulted in a cocktail mix of factors that nearly resulted in a mutiny within our group- as a leader, he miserably failed to get buy-in from most of us and no one missed him when he moved on to his next assignment. Overall, his managerial style was contentious and confrontational. Even when he was being supported, he managed to alienate himself by demeaning the work of others and our customers’ needs.
Still, this is an excellent example of how emotions can hijack one’s productivity and effectiveness as a leader. Let me explain how your brain can play tricks on you as a leader.
THE STORY
First of all, let me start with the story. We are programmed to love stories. As social animals, we come from a history of spoken tales and stories. In the “Old Times”, our tribe probably sat around the fire sharing stories about our latest hunt, or a story we heard from someone else. The point of the story was to teach a lesson about a success, a failure or try to build our status, improving our executive presence, within our in-group. Our brains are programmed to look for stories. And when the different elements don’t add up to a full story, it will fill in the blanks.
For example, in my previous story, there were a lot of assumptions and missing parts. To start with, I did not mention that the new executive was coming from successfully managing the sales and marketing for the most important US-based account that the organization had at the time. He had been extremely successful in increasing sales and promoting our brand to that account’s customers, bringing a market share that we would never again enjoy in the US market. I also failed to mention that my supervisor at the time, was not technically my supervisor — the manager to whom I reported decided to solely focus the most important of the three regions, leaving a temporary gap that the VP filled. The VP had never the intention to become our supervisor but we, the heads of the three regions, enjoyed reporting to him directly. By the way, he did not speak any Spanish either.
THE EMOTIONS
We, the heads of the three regions, failed betrayed that the organization had decided to bring a new manager from “outside our tribe”. We were a team that had been organically growing together in those regions. We knew each other and more importantly, we trusted each other. Research says that we will believe a new argument if (1) the source is within our in-group, and it comes from someone we know and trust, (2) depending on how much confidence we have on the old argument that it is replacing, and (3) the potential repercussion that the change has on us.
Why is this important? Because many of our decisions are taken from an emotional point of view and not a factual point of view. When a new fact comes from someone we trust, we don’t tap into our limbic system, specifically into the amygdala, the emotion center of our brain. We are able to look at it in a more “logical” manner.
On the other hand, look at what happened in the previous story. We had an outsider, someone not from our own in-group, telling us that we needed to change. To start with, we were filling already anger with the situation, and aimed at this individual. We were already in our limbic system, filtering anything we heard from this person through our emotional epicenter. We did not trust this individual and we were resisting. He was trying to use logic with an emotional distrustful group of individuals.
At the same time, this new individual failed to register what we were feeling. Instead of showing empathy with us, he decided to use logic to show us why we needed to change… we saw it as a rebuke of years of good work and growth. Instead of looking at it as a need to change to keep our productivity and sales growth, we saw it as a judgment on our previous work.
For some groups, trust is something that may come from the position. For most of us, culturally, trust was something that needed to be earned. Assuming that we should trust him, only made us more upset. Not recognizing that he did not have our trust, was frustrating to both parties — then, he tried to use positional power, telling us that we were going to change regardless of what we thought about his plans or himself. Throw some gasoline into the fire…
BURNOUT
Being emotional is physically and physiologically draining. After a few months of back-and-forth, most of us were exhausted. We decided to use humor and cynicism as a defense mechanism. The climate of the organization was becoming toxic and unconducive to collaboration and creativity. Productivity started to fall.
Having interpreted his demands for change, many of us started to wonder if our success was due more to luck than skills and hard work. We started questioning our processes and, using cynicism, we started judging the work done within our team. That magnified the toxicity within our own teams, creating divides among functions and geographic teams.
Many started looking for other positions within the organization to escape the general negativity. This escape made some individuals feel as they were committing treason to the rest of the team, cheating their friends and colleagues. More emotional exhaustion.
Soon, burnout was evident within the organization, negatively affecting the overall results.
YOUR MOST PRECIOUS SHIELD — SELF-AWARENESS
As a leader, we need to cultivate our emotional self-awareness, by connecting with our own emotions and, at the same time, connecting with the emotions of those within our team. We need to understand that, the perceived behaviors, born from our emotions, have an impact on the team. As I have said many times before, we know what our intent is, but we seldom know what our impact is on other, unless they tell us. We need to learn to regulate our emotions to pull away from our amygdala and move into our pre-frontal cortex, our logic center.
Putting a label on your emotions is an important part of your emotional self-regulation and self-awareness. As we give a name to what we are feeling (and if there is trust), we invite others to let us know what they are feeling. This provides a better understanding on what parts of the process need to be addressed and corrected.
CHALLENGE THE ASSUMPTIONS
We started talking about the story before and as part of the solutions, this is the second step. Why? Because we need to move from an emotional state to an analytical state. When we create our story, we need to stop filtering and filling the missing gaps through our emotional center. Moving to the frontal lobe, means that we have the capacity identify those gaps, questioning our assumptions and seeking new factual information.
All those actions require from us some impulse control and emotional regulation, including effective stress management. Two assessments allow leaders to better develop the necessary self-awareness. The first one, one of my favorite, is the Conflict Dynamic Profile. Through CDP, you are able to understand what makes you tick and what’s your favorite way to handle conflict. It provides you with an understanding on what constructive and destructive behaviors you may regular engage with during a relationship or when faced with conflict. The CDP shows you some of your hot buttons, those things that make you tick. Having the self-awareness of what may engage your amygdala allows you to better control your emotions.
The CDP can be either a self-administered assessment as well as a 360-approach assessment (meaning, you will hear from the impact you have on other individuals, and their perception on how you handle conflict and negotiate).
The other assessment that provides you with a good picture on your emotional intelligence is the EQi-2.0 and the EQ360. The first one is a self-assessment on how you believe you show up to other people in five different scales (Self-Perception, Self-Expression, Stress Management, Decision Making, and Interpersonal).
The best thing about these two assessments is that, unlike personality or IQ, you can effectively change your scores, improving the way you handle conflicts, express or manage your emotions. You are shown results on different scales that you can directly affect through a development plan that a certified coach can help you develop. Basically, you can improve your scores by developing different areas of your leadership style, becoming a more effective and engaging leader.
As I have been preaching in many of my previous blogs, self-awareness is the key to a good leader. The more we learn about ourselves, the better leaders we will show to our teams.
